The outgoing senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, says the Democratic brand is now “toxic” and that he no longer considers himself a devotee of the party once helmed by the likes of John F. Kennedy and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In an exit interview with CNN, the former Democrat who turned independent this year after announcing that he would not run for reelection says the party has become obsessed with preaching to people instead of governing and blamed the party’s far-left for its electoral failings.
“The D-brand has been so maligned from the standpoint of, it’s just, it’s toxic,” he said in the interview with Manu Raju. “They have basically expanded upon thinking, ‘Well, we want to protect you there, but we’re going to tell you how you should live your life.’”
He said the party’s leftward shift is out of touch with the majority of Americans. “This country is not going left,” he said.
“The people in America voted,” Mr. Manchin said. “They had that opportunity, you know, to vote with Kamala Harris and with Donald Trump. Donald Trump, there’s not much hasn’t been said. You know exactly what you’re getting. He hasn’t made any bones about it.”
After playing the role of a perennial thorn in the side of the Biden administration in the evenly divided Senate throughout the 118th Congress, Mr. Manchin announced in November of 2023 that he would not seek reelection in the 2024 election and — after briefly flirting with the idea of a run for president under a third-party banner or the ill-fated No Labels ticket — would not run for any public office in the future.
Despite his reluctance to run, Mr. Manchin, who served in the Senate for 15 years, insisted in the interview that America is ready for a third party to speak for centrist and moderate voters who feel alienated by the excesses of the current iterations of both the Democratic and Republican parties. Perhaps, he said, the party should be named the “American Party.”
“The centrist-moderate vote decides who’s going to be the president of the United States. And when they get here, they don’t govern that way. Neither side does. They go to their respective corners,” Mr. Manchin said. “So if the center had a voice and had a party that could make both of these — the Democrat, Republican Party — come back, OK, that would be something.”
Mr. Manchin raised eyebrows recently when he showed up at an Army-Navy football game alongside President-elect Trump, Senator Vance and a host of other bold-faced names from the MAGA world. In the interview with CNN, he said he gets “along fine” with Trump and his acolytes and told the incoming president that he wants to help the new administration “any way I can.”
“I want you to succeed,” Mr. Manchin said he told Trump. “Every red-blooded American should want your president to succeed, whether you vote for him or not, whether the same party or not, whether you like him or not.”
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